Smooth Criminal
by PsychicAbsol
Summary: "So you're that lonesome gym leader that never managed to get a date, and the winter's ball is coming up. What to do, if not to kidnap an unsuspecting trainer? Why, ask out the feared criminal you've just helped to bring to jail …" Sabrina x J, not totally serious fic.
1. Chapter 1

"Smooth Criminal"

 **A/N: Spontaneous idea I had when I realized that Sabrina x J exists, and is, in fact, called MorganeShipping. Three-parter, with a sequel being in process. J here is the *teeniest* bit based on the J from "Pkmn2k10" / "Blood In, Blood Out", but no worries, no inhuman, cold-blooded torture taking place.**

 **Not yet, at least.**

 **About the timeline: Takes place during the anime D/P series, sometime between DP020 and DP045 (so between J's first and second appearance.)**

When one thinks of ideal places for a first date, an affection seeking person has many options to choose from. Fancy restaurants, quiet parks, the beach, or, for the more simple-minded folks, the own apartment is also one.

Usually, a prison cell is not among these options.

Yet when your breadwinning occupation is besides the range of legality, one tends to meet a lot of similar minded individuals there anyway, and sooner or later, one was bound to find a compatible soul among those that had negative experience with the police.

Usually, the middle-aged woman with the short, powder-blue hair would have scolded at the reminder of her occasional incompetence, and objected being associated with those petty criminals that were dumb enough to leave trails of proof or living witnesses of their misbehavior behind. Usually, she was above these humane mistakes, as she considered herself without pride one of the more competent villains that Kanto had ever had the misfortune of housing. Even she, though, would have to admit that these statements held at least two grave mistakes. First, she was anything but a _villain._ She was a business woman. It just so happened that her business was acquiring Pokemon that, unfortunately, already had dunderheads that claimed to be their owners, for her clients. Secondly, Kanto was and had never been her home. That hapless title still belonged to the colder continent of Sinnoh.

But as fate liked to lick its fingers in anticipation of chaos, and the events that had let to her imprisonment had involved at least one another person that was at least as far away from the norm as she herself usually was, Jean Hunter, or Hunter J, as she liked to be called nowadays for something akin to a beneficial unawareness level, had decided to cross the adjective "usual" out of her dictionary.

She would soon come to the realization that this was one of the sanest decisions she had made that day, but we're not yet at the point where we can raise ourselves above our poor, chained criminal and dare to make a judgment of what she should or should not have done.

Outside of her cold, wet and masoned prison cell, which seemed to have come right out of the latest fantasy movie pretending to take place in the middle ages, was a similar plain and boring corridor, which let to the undoubtedly more costly furnished police headquarter of the city of Saffron. She was held in investigative custody, but it was all a farce, a lawful farce, for no one with a sane mind doubted her participation in the attempted theft of the Pokemon of Silph Co. anymore. It wasn't as if she could claim she had just burrowed the huge airship that was strangely equipped perfectly for stealing Pokemon from a friend, and had, accidently, parked it on top of the Silph Tower while also hitting the button on accident that would disable all security systems from outside. No, J might have been heinous and uncaring, but she was not as harebrained as to claim innocence. She knew when it was time to just shut up that thin line of a mouth she had, and just sit out what there was to come. It wasn't the first time she had seen a prison from the inside, though she had to admit that it had been a while since she had last been forced to sit behind steel bars. Nonetheless, it was nothing to lose her sanity over. A few weeks lost, of course, time's money, a few weeks of otherwise profitable income lost, that's what it was. She didn't mind losing her freedom that much- it would be hypercritical of her given what she had done to hundreds of Pokemon over the course of her impressive career, but she regretted the missed opportunities.

She had no idea what kind of opportunity would soon present itself to her in a most unusual proposal.

She could hear the talking of the various, similar if not outright copyrighted looking officers, and would have rolled her eyes if not for the indignity of such an action. Did they really think she wouldn't hear their whisper, their hushed accusations and murmurs? She would never outright admit that she was proud of the reputation she had worked herself up to, yet it was obvious that she consciously listened to the Jennies outside mesmerizing and analyzing the fact that they had brought down one of the most feared criminals of Sinnoh known to strike fear into the hearts of foreign league attendants and even daring to take up a fight with the Sinnoh Pokemon Champion.

Of course, if the officers had even the slightest bit of self-assessment, they would have admitted that it was not their achievement only, but a combined effect of their forces reacting fast enough to chain J before their gym leader could have torn out the older woman's bowels and use them to decorate the street lamps. As every child in Saffron had learnt for the past twenty years, it was a very bad idea to enrage their gym leader, not matter what kind of high end technology one owned.

In that regard, J's capture didn't fill in the bill of being "usual" as well. The hunter had, admittedly, never experienced the strength of a psychic user before. They were just pretty rare, and the lone exemplar of their species in Sinnoh, Elite Four trainer Lucian, was anything but a prime example of eagerly energy. If anything, his specialty would have been to act as an effective sleeping pill on her without the use of hypnosis. He was the type of guy she would expect to know "War and Peace" by heart.

With that in mind, the thought of being bested by an esper didn't hurt as much anymore. J even found the chance to think of possible future counter-measures. After all, there was the obvious weakness of psychics to darkness, and she was sure there had to be artificial ways to reproduce that effect by now that could be incorporated into her ship.

For a moment, the calm and professional J had been so captured by visions of future endeavors that she had failed to notice the sudden silence that had overcome the police headquarters. The quiet murmurs of the officers had stopped altogether, and all that was left to be heard instead was the stomach-piercing clacking of stiff stiletto heels on shivering stone flooring, as if even the boarding decided that this woman was too much to take.

There was not a single resident in Saffron that hadn't experienced the eerie and upsetting event of the gym leader suddenly materializing somewhere she hadn't been before mere seconds ago, and there was hardly a living soul occupying the city that wouldn't admit being scared at least once by this spectacle.

Sadly, the same couldn't be applied to _undead_ souls, as a certain ghost loved to turn the tables on his involuntary trainer.

It was telling that by now, Sabrina didn't even need to teleport anymore to make the police fall silent at once.

J, who so far had refused to take a seat at the more comfortable wooden pallet, dared to glance up when a shadow fell unto her hunched form. It was only the second time she met this woman, and already she could feel herself developing a lasting grudge for these uncaring endless pits that were her eyes. J was used to see fear, panic or at least a greater deal of respect in the eyes of her enemies. She herself savored to observe her victims from behind her goggles, and take in all of their emotions like a dry sponge. She would not openly gloat about that, as she would appear to ignore her enemies as long as they didn't get in her way, but the truth was that when other, saner individuals counted sheep at night to get a good dose of sleep, she recalled the faces of these cowards, as they trembled in fear of her and her alone, and that made her smile and sleep soundly.

So it clearly upset her to stare into the face of someone who objectively showed no emotion at all, and who had taken her down without so much as a bat of an eyelash.

Which was only logical, as most psychics used their eyes to channel their powers, and keeping them closed was quite counter-productive.

The psychic, on the other hand, regarded J with something akin to pity. Pity in regards to not only what had conspired before, but more strongly to what would conspire not much later. And, truly, being pitied by a seer was one of the easiest ways to become an early victim to depression. But thankfully, J had no idea about the inner workings of what she was dealing with, so she was blissfully unaware of the mechanics behind the machinery.

Sabrina ceased her glance over J for a moment, and turned aside to face the several officers that were hunched together in the doorframe, silently gasping and wordlessly fighting and crawling over each other to get a better look at their local celebrity. She lifted a single finger at her side, without raising her hand, and the four women that were daring to interrupt this first moment of privacy were swiftly thrown back into the entrance hall, the iron door closing with a metallic pang behind them.

They were now alone, and neither of them was afraid of it.

"Stand up."

Normally, J was not one to obey orders. There hadn't been a single person in her life that could pull orders on her successfully. Not even her parents had that kind of authority over her, neither had any other relatives or teachers that had been trying to break the young girl from early on. And still, she stood up. To her defense, she didn't see it as compliance as much as a simple desire to stand up by herself and see her new and old interlocutor face to face.

In an attempt to get that across as clearly as she could to that humane imitation of a stone statue, J crossed her arms over each other, ignoring the fact that, dressed in the plain and simple attire an inmate was allowed, she looked as impressive as a muzzled up Houndoom.

Yet even a devil's dog shut up in such a way still posed a threat to a psychic user by exerting its simple presence, and as such, Sabrina kept her defense up. She knew as well as J herself did who she was dealing with, but fearing the hunter was outside of her repertoire, as were most emotions a normal human could experience and express.

She was simply doing as the law proposed, yet it remained to be defined if she was thinking about the law of state that every citizen should obey, or if she had an entirely different kind of law in mind, the one that stated that it was always the powerful that made the rules, and that therefore automatically put her in position of unbound power. When one was obeying no other rule but its own, gutting an enemy and swinging their intestines around a hydrant wasn't a severe case of breaking one's right to remain intact, but a job for the city cleaning.

Following a greater law was the reason why she had stopped J from interfering with Silph's plans to create the fourth generation of artificial engineered Pokemon as well as the reason why she had come to the police headquarters unheralded. She didn't need to be a mind reader to know that what she would soon propose to J would break _any_ kind of law both she and the middle-aged woman in front of her knew, as well as probably breaking a few brain cells in two, and not in the nice, schizogenesis-kind of way. If anything, it was more of a schizophrenia-like way of dividing cells, a clear example of how psychics might have bigger brains than the usual human by simple, objective measurements, but without the benefits of being any saner.

She closed her eyes for a split moment, wondering how she should formulate the following words so as to not scare J away from the very beginning. She wasn't known for her tactfulness, if anything, she was known to be so blunt it bordered on offensiveness, and dealing with the more delicate duties of a gym leader was something she gladly left to her subordinates in general. But sometimes, matters took on such a level of privateness that she was forced to take them into her own hands and, quite literally, hope for the best.

There was still the matter of mind influencing, but if she could have it any other way, she would rather stay away from taking over a stranger's mind. It wasn't as if she couldn't, or found it too unconscionable. But other minds could be as alien as another planet and therefore, just as dangerous as questing through foreign land.

She wouldn't be the first psychic to die of the poisonous stinger of a venomous soul.

When she opened her eyes again, the criminal was standing directly in front of her, arms still crossed, eyebrows drawn together into a deep frown, but grey eyes observing her closely nonetheless. Her lips were pressed together into a thin line of light pink, with no teeth showing behind. Inwardly, the psychic sighed. She could work with that, she supposed…

After all, it was better than being forced to take her former rival Kiyo, or heaven and hell forbid, a human turned _Haunter_...

"So…" J broke the unannounced staring war first, starting to feel irritated by the dark purple eyes that just wouldn't leave her face, or blinked anytime, for the matter. If she hadn't known any better, J would have guessed that one of the prototype robotic Pokemon that she had intended to take from Silph had escaped and now wanted to thank her in person.

"I came here with an offer to you." The psychic finally answered, not taking her eyes from J any moment. Again, this action puzzled J, as much as the statement itself did. She had not expected the psychic to visit her with any kind of proposal except for the choice between being gunned down or hanged or having her brain fried out from under her. She was also very much used to her opponents staring at her for uncomfortable long amounts of time, but when they did, it was mostly out of fear of being ambushed by her or her Pokemon, and not because they didn't seem to be physically able to take away their gaze. It was unnerving to a critical level.

"Okay. Shoot." J tried to lift the corner of her lips in an attempted smile, but that broke off of the psychic's stoic aura as easily as rain drops did on a Teflon pan. It was only natural, J guessed. Shooting was probably the last resort a psychic relied on, the moment their power had fizzled out, or they felt particularly bored by their usual methods of torture.

Sabrina took in a deep breath. Not that J noticed, or that anyone else would have noticed. It seemed irregular to think of her as a breathing being. And living with Haunter had certainly told her that for some beings, breathing was indeed just a cumbersome additional business.

Still, she had the rare moment of intentional feeling that whatever she said next would determine how her whole endeavor went off.

"I assume that you want to leave prison as soon as possible."

J shifted from one foot to another.

"And what if that's the case?" She said, instead of directly answering the question. It wasn't as if she wanted to come off as exceptionally cocky- at least not only. She was waiting for the punchline, for the revelation, because no one sane could honestly assume that she was _glad_ to be behind prison bars and would rather chain herself to the bars than to be dragged out, because prison food and being raped in the showers was just the ideal way of life, right?

Unbeknownst to J, Sabrina totally failed at the traditional kind of punchlines that didn't involve bombs or gag mittens, and had J continued to wait for any kind of punchline, she would have long been skeletonised before anything worthwhile would have happened.

"Then I would like to invite you to the annual gym leader's winter ball as my date."

J was too paralyzed to assume that this _might_ have been the punchline.

But then again, it _wasn't_ the punchline, so she could hardly be accused of being inattentive.

"What?"

And before we let Sabrina answer this question in a rather diplomatic and long-winded way, we'll go back in time a day and see how this unusual scene had been arranged…

~*~Flashback~*~

Despite its honored and traditional outlook, the united Pokemon league of Kanto and Johto had seen a lot of innovations in the recent years. Using a modern intra-net to connect the far-flung gym leaders was one of them. Using simple e-mail addresses and guided internet telephony might have been cheaper and easier to implement, but the public money didn't like to spend itself, and claiming that you had something all the other countries did not have yet always sounded smug and cool, whether it was a female champion, a rare Pokemon disease or a private internet connection that was mostly used to share gossip about and between colleagues.

And occasionally, between all the spam that naturally piled up in the private mail boxes, a message that turned out to be rather important and momentous was found.

As the gym leaders' ball took place once a year, and its date was settled, one would have assumed that the invitation mail complete with the request to name their entourage didn't come to any gym leader as a surprise.

Far wrong.

Some gym leaders liked to pretend intensely that the ball did not exist, and therefore, they had mastered the difficult technique of completely shutting out the possibility of attending until it was far too late to recline. Only to totally lose their minds then when it came to finding someone boisterous, or plain suicidal enough to risk accompanying them. There was a reason the letter said that just picking or bribing a random person off from the streets was not polite and unrepresentative of the gym leaders as a whole.

Not to mention that it cut off Forrest's excuse of kidnapping the nearest Joy or Jenny.

There had been a time not too long ago, when the solution in the case of the odd gym leader of Saffron had been fairly easy: Simply not to attend the ball at all. And the even easier reason for that had been that she had never been invited. The psychic supposed that she could see the reasoning behind: Why invite the freak with the talking doll when you wanted to wake up the next day, alive, in your own body, not the size of a spoon and preferably in your own house (or in the house of the person you were leaving with the last night, as we're not that picky in that case)?

As soon as word of her reportedly healing had gone around and reached Indigo Plateau, though, some kind-hearted and, debatably, goody two shoes souls had decided that she deserved the chance to disgrace herself as much as any other gym leader did, and therefore, she was invited.

Apparently, no one had decided to inform her beforehand of this decision and therefore spare her the sudden, intensive feeling of dread that rose in her stomach, combined with the painful realization that she had no one she could safely invite to the ball. There was, sure, the option of inviting her father as some unfortunate girls did when it came to their prom ball (as it seemed even less socially acceptable for boys to invite their mothers)but Sabrina correctly assumed that in case of a gym leaders' ball of legally adult persons of a more or less adult mind, this was not possible.

Which left her with just few other options aside from resorting to imprisonment. She could ask some of the staff of her gym, but a lot of them had similar behavioral oddities as she used to, not to mention that for some reason, she was seen as an unapproachable goddess by some of them in such a way that openly asking them to accompany her to the ball would likely cause gasping, arrhythmia or spontaneous fainting from them. That, she also supposed, wouldn't pose to be the best background.

On the other hand, it also seemed cheap to just employ someone who already worked for her for such a feature. After all, she was paying them money for their handiwork, and paying them for forcing them to spend even more time with her made her kind of look like a cheap escort lady.

Just like J would decide not a day later that it was fate's fault she would never even dare to think of such a thing as banality existing anymore, Sabrina's sixth (or rather seventh) sense began to shrill that very moment, just like her mobile phone did. She supposed that it was finally time to change that obnoxious dingle of a factory pre-installed ring tone, but the general urgency of the event prevented her from acting it out right away. Instead, she answered the phone first, not even waiting for the voice on the other hand to finish its pressing demand.

"I'll be there, Officer." In fact, she would have appeared on the spot of action sooner, had the upsetting invitation not put a sort of imbalance to her daily routine.

She paused for a single moment, though, before teleporting away to the usually tightly secured skyscraper of Silph. And as we already adumbrate it, the well-beloved adjective was again nothing more than a disguise, for the security of Silph was not a tough nut to crack for either Sabrina or J. In fact, had she possessed anything like a functional sense of humor, Sabrina might have found it amusing to teleport through the corridors of the research and development department of Silph's. Industrial espionage was not her prime interest, but it would make a good secondary employment should Goodshow ever decide it wasn't lethal anymore to suggest cutting her salary.

She paused, letting her mental eye wander around the city for a moment, and high above it. Without moving from her spot, she analyzed the inner workings of the enemy she soon had to deal with. But it wasn't secret entrances to a wide open soul she was looking to break in. She was looking for an entirely different sort of door, a kind of openness to differences and alternation she was looking for. Obviously finding what she was looking for, or at least a manageable way to make it work out for her anyways- one that may or may not have included a negligible amount of psychic manipulation, she was soared away in an untraceable breeze of wind.

She supposed that it wasn't kidnapping an unsuspecting passerby away from the streets per se, even if it was close enough to the definition that she might have had to take precautions in case she was sued anyway. Not that anybody in Saffron was dumb enough to sue a psychic in control of most of the judiciary of Saffron anyway, but when she was considering J, she wasn't talking about a Saffron native.

Something which, she mused with the tiniest amount of malice, actually made the task of asking her out considerably easier on her.

Not on J. Not the tiniest bit.

~*~Present day~*~

And so we are back to the actual reaction of the involuntary date, whose first instinct was to croak her head so as to get a chance to look above the head of her counterpart and check if she hadn't overlooked the hidden camera in the stony wall in front of her. Disappointingly, she couldn't find anything of that kind, and had to grudgingly accept that whatever satire she was part of was for real, and not the mental offspring of an eager television director.

She wasn't sure what should upset her more: The fact that she had been asked such a scandalous question without even hints of remorse, or the fact that she didn't _feel_ any resentment about it.

"Okay." The first step to get actually back to reality was, in her case, to show a sign of life behind the sudden stony façade she had taken upon, as soon as her mind had stopped processing ways in which this statement could have been misunderstood by her. Finding no ways in the end, she decided to tackle the subject directly. Had she not been imprisoned, she supposed she would have tackled the woman directly, and, after her, the officers in the adjoining room, hoping to gain her freedom that way.

"Okay, okay…" She began to massage her temple. That was a gesture she would repeat a lot during the following hour. And days. "Why?" There was nothing that guaranteed her a right to know the circumstances which had brewed this scandal of an idea, but it couldn't hurt to ask. Not when she had not made up her mind yet if she would accept, or just plainly go back to sleep in an attempt to wake up in a more logical world.

Sabrina would have bit her lip if she had been closer to the habits of the average human. But she wasn't, and therefore, her façade didn't change a single bit when she was asked the question. Neither did she bat an eyelash when she answered J's question in an even, calm voice.

"You were the first person available. And you don't have any personal connections to me that could influence your decision and stain your later reputation once you've been seen in public with me."

J raised an eyebrow. Whoever worried about how a fake date might affect her reputation was either not right in his mind, or was something to actually be very wary of.

J was right in her assumption that Sabrina was both.

Still, the criminal had to actually consider the _positive_ effects of this arrangement. She would be out of prison in a far shorter amount of time than she could ever have dreamed off. Some days, at most, instead of several years. She could be back into business by the end of the week, meaning that the financial losses were almost negligible. And all of that, just for the price of pretending to be some lonesome freak's girlfriend.

She guessed she could work with that.

"Okay, so, assuming- and I'm merely saying assuming, this is not a concrete consent yet…"

It was, Sabrina's mind reading told her, but she would leave J in the illusion of mental privacy for a moment longer.

"…what will be my rights and responsibilities?" She supposed she wouldn't have a problem with posing as her partner and answering inquiries accordingly, and her not soild yet hips would also not object some or the other dance prompt. But any further demands would be met with an iron refusal.

Again, if Sabrina had actually paid attention during her social studies lessons, which the league had required her to take after she had been healed only in the most basic form of and her social skills had been shown to be lacking severely, she would have underlined her lack of knowledge with a shrug. The way it was, though, she simply stared ahead and told J as much. "All the league requires from the gym leaders is to bring a suitable partner to the ball, and state their identity beforehand. You may be required to wear something fitting to the occasion, though." Sabrina paused. That might pose a problem both for her and her surprise date. She had never before been required to wear anything that was _both_ formal _and_ discernible female, and she hadn't taken into account the possibility that J didn't own such a garment, either.

J, though, just shrugged nonchalantly. "Okay. I can work with that." She paused, waiting for a reply from the psychic, which, obviously, didn't come. "When can I get out, then?"

Sabrina glanced to the side, checking mentally on the statuses of the nearby officers. They were all awake, and in different states of nervousness and anxiety, not sure how to deal with the interruption of their everyday life that was taking place.

"I can arrange for your release to be taking place today." That was an understatement. She didn't need any approval to do whatever the hell she felt like she wanted to. If she had really felt all that pressed for time, she would have been able to smash the ludicrous stone walls that were separating J from freedom into pulverulent pebble with ease. She just wasn't in the mood to destroy any more public property today.

"Once that has happened, you are free to reclaim your ship", or rather, what was left of her ship after being bombarded by several Porygon's Tri-Attacks as well as a good bunch of Shadow Balls from a petulant Haunter, " and return to wherever you call your home. I will inform you in given time about both the circumstance and the time and place of the ball. Be assured that it is useless to try and hide your whereabouts from me. I will find you regardless of your efforts. "

There were people who would have shuddered in sheer fear after hearing these words. It was never a good omen to be sought after by a psychic, nor was it reassuring to know that hiding proved to be as useless as most other defensive mechanisms.

J, though, had only momentarily considered the option of taking her ship and her heels and escape to Sinnoh or alternatively as far away as possible. But once she began to ponder the pros and cons of such an action, she became aware of the fact that going through with the date was a lot less of a hassle than having to prepare both her ship and crew for an emergency take-off.

Therefore, she only found the energy to shrug nonchalantly and uncaring, dismissing the option of fleeing entirely and telling the psychic as much. Sabrina gave the faintest hint of a nod, seeing nothing but the bare truth of that statement in the older woman's mind. It seemed to be one of the most basic lessons of human behavior that whatever was spoken most certainly didn't reflect the entity of what was thought or felt, and, most confusingly, most of the time not even the speaker himself seemed to be aware of this inconsistency, something which frustrated Sabrina to an incredible level. In J's case, though, there was simple not enough will to care to create a dissonance. She was glad to be free either way, and therefore, she didn't question her motives.

She would be fully busy questioning her sanity not much later.

J had assumed that now that the formalities were settled, the gym leader would inform the officers about her intentions and J would be let free, albeit most certainly grudgingly by the Jennies that had actually been hoping for a medal in honor of capturing a criminal that had escaped the law forces of Sinnoh for far too long. All of these childish assumptions were yet another sign that J had no idea yet of whom she was just dealing with. Instead, the psychic lifted her index finger and placed it above the sliding hatches mechanism, which promptly sprung to life and opened up the gates for the not yet convicted criminal.

J, most certainly ambushed by the sudden noise, and most certainly not startled by the way the situation was accelerating, sprung back a few feet, nearly making contact with the wall on her way. She glanced first at the open door to her left, fighting the impulse to rub her eyes at this miracle of coincidences piling up. Then she glanced back at the woman who had manipulated her cell with just the tiniest amount of supernatural energy, and shook her head to clear it of the uncertainties forming behind her eyes like rain clouds wafting together. She walked through the door just as easily as she had walked in, after she had kicked the haughty Jenny that had been daring to shove her through the grid in the groin. Which was a surprisingly good strategy even on women, J noted.

She walked past the psychic, still not quite believing what was just transpiring, and keeping her guard up in case any unexpected ambush took place. She supposed even then, she couldn't put up much of a fight, given how easily the psychic had bested her before, and how defenseless she was without her Pokemon and equipment, but it was better to keep up at least some illusion of self-defense then to admit that one was totally unprotected.

And now, speaking about…

"Your Pokemon will be provided to you once I can get them out of the custody of the evidence vault."

J blinked, once again shaking her head. She hoped she wouldn't have to get used to having her mind read. She had enough little dirty secrets she would not want to share with the public, but then again, if the psychic wanted to scroll through the indexed novel her mind was, it was her own fault.

She was still too dazed to consider that just passing by the officers without given a single care in the world was highly unusual, and therefore, a very clear indicator of things to come.

The officers, for their part, couldn't have done anything about it at any rate, since their muscles had been frozen in place for the past ten minutes, and the first of them were starting to experience painful cramps that would prevent them from running after J even after she had left the headquarters. All hope was lost, as random passersby who happened to walk by the headquarters either failed to recognize J- after all, a woman wearing a long trenchcoat, knee high leather boots and futuristic goggles was hardly a sight to be remembered in the capital city of Saffron. Or they actually recognized J's face from the news coverage, and decided that it was their best chance at getting a good mobile pic of a well-known thief.

And with that, J was free.

End Part I


	2. Chapter 2

Part II

A week later, the lingering feeling behind J's temples that indicated that something heavily out of the ordinary had conspired was still there, but had quieted down considerably. Her crew had been just as confused as she had been, but they had failed much harder than her at concealing it. She had been faced with questions of "how?" and "how the hell?" several times, but had only given the scarcest of all answers. "Because." Or, in a variant: "Because so." She didn't have the nerves to tell them that she had paid for her freedom by basically selling her reputation, but it was easier paying that no attention than to mull over how she was getting out of this unharmed. After all, so far, she hadn't heard so much as a tweet from her savior, and she was glad for that, for it gave her the illusion that the issue had been closed and forgotten for all of time.

Sadly, it hadn't been, and as aware as J had been of that immoveable fact, it hit her as hard a brick on sound velocity in the stomach when it came to actual points of fulfillment.

It wasn't something out of the usual for her henchmen to be trembling in fear when they approached her with their concerns, nor was it unusual for them to start stuttering once she had declared them free to speak. What was unusual, though, and therefore back into the theme of the whole endeavor, was that the henchman didn't even get to speak for himself. Instead, the woman decided to introduce her business right by herself.

J had almost jumped out of her chair by sheer surprise when Sabrina walked into the command centre of her ship. It was one thing for a human being to be able to teleport- that was something J might be able to wrap her mind around in time, but apparently teleporting onto the deck of a _flying_ ship, which was several thousand meters _airborne_ , that was something new for sure.

The psychic didn't seem to be impressed with anything, neither her extraordinarily talent not the high end layout of the ship when she approached J.

"We need to go shopping."

There were moments in J's life when she supposed, had she the right weapons on hand and available right away, she would have gone on a murder spree. In 99% of her cases, the source of her irritation were other human beings, and in 90% of such cases, it were her henchmen acting up or failing her that would make her blood boil in the most fatal of always.

The henchmen that had dared not to cover his mouth in time to hide his delightful gurgle should have felt lucky that she was simply not in the mood today to stain her clothes with his freshly splashing blood.

And it would be a shame to ruin her clothes, seeing as how _shopping_ , of all the things possible, was punched onto her timetable today.

She rubbed her temples, forcefully reminding herself that this was the woman who had freed her, and disobeying her might result in yet another unwillingly visit to the paddy wagon.

"Fine, okay…" She waved her hand, and no sooner than she had said these words, she was warped away to…somewhere. The air pressed out of her lungs forcefully, and her senses being scrambled like an egg in a frying pan, it took her a minute to reassemble herself, before she was able to take in her surroundings and doing a quick check-up on where she might have ended up.

From the looks of it, it was...well, a shopping centre. J crossed her arms, showing her discomfort as openly as she could without resorting to actual facial expressions.

Which bore just perfectly for the two individuals, as one was unwilling to show emotions, and the other plain unable to read them correctly.

J supposed that there was at least some kind of logic behind it. One went shopping in a shopping centre, right? That was what the name implied, right? Still, it seemed so entirely out of place to be standing in front of the fancy white building with the glass walls that she hadn't entirely discarded the probability of still being asleep, or alternatively, having the misfortune of her head steersman having piloted the ship into a mountain and her hitting her head on the control panel.

"Ah, here you are!" A light, entirely too feminine voice called from some place to their right, and J had to repress the urge to jump a few meters straight into the air again as a woman who had been sitting and seemingly napping peacefully on the stony rim of a fountain sprung to life and ambushed them.

Sabrina, though, was as cool as usually, apparently recognizing the woman that had approached them. "Thank you for agreeing to help, Erika."

The blue-haired woman hand-waved the comment. "No need to thank me, 'rina- After all, it's a pleasure to help anyone with dollying up. It has almost become some sort of side job for me." She scrutinized J from head to toe, who felt increasingly unwell at this treatment.

"So that's her…?"

"Yes."

J was certain she didn't even want to know the implications of what had been discussed between the other two women about her identity.

"I beg your pardon, but may I inquire where you picked such a thing up?"

Well, that almost dwelled into an affront, right? J wasn't one to care though, as she wanted to get over this as soon as possible.

"A police station."

Erika paused and J cringed. Well, it wasn't entirely wrong, it was just…. _wrong._

„Um…okay, I guess." There was no doubt in Erika's mind that she would use the first chance to take Sabrina aside and hold a _serious_ discussion with the psychic about more proper places to pick up young women. Or women in general, as she placed the futuristic dressed companion between thirty and forty.

Not that she was all that surprised about Sabrina having taken an interest in older women. Anyone beneath thirty simply seemed not to possess the right amount of serenity and composure to withstand the psychic's oddities.

Speaking about composure, Erika reminded herself to be polite, no matter what scoundrel she was presented with. She had a job to do here, after all, and she was the kind of woman to welcome a challenge with wide open arms.

"Nice to meet you, Miss…"There was a momentarily pause as J refused to give away her true name, and was far too lazy to come up with another alias for something that, in her eyes, shouldn't take longer than twenty minutes. At most.

Oh, she was really in for a surprise, wasn't she? Obviously, she had never went shopping with another woman, and filled up her own wardrobe by ordering from the internet.

"Please, call me Jean, if you have to call me anything." Erika blinked. Well, there were certainly things she _wanted_ to call her, but none of them were appropriate for a public setting where children might be within earshot.

And still, Sabrina was blissfully unaware of what was going on next to her.

Erika politely cleared her throat. "Nice to meet you, Miss Jean. I hope you had a pleasant day so far." By now, J, wouldn't have been surprised if Erika started curtseying in front of her, and truly, Erika had been momentarily wondering if that might have been the right response. In the end, she decided against it, as she had a clear codex of which people deserved her respect, and which didn't.

It was a lucky coincidence that Erika was not aware yet that she would soon be dressing up a well-known criminal.

"As you may have been told", no, she hadn't been told anything at all, she had been abducted from her ship, for Arceus' sake, but not that all of that mattered much to the Celadon gym leader, " I will help you regarding the regalements of the dress code of the league."

J would have snorted if she had cared. The same league that had left her untouched for years had a dress code that needed professional counseling. Figures.

"The annual gym leader's winter ball is a prestigious event to celebrate the union of our land and leadership. It is an honorable duty to accompany a gym leader to such an occasion." J almost snorted. Of course. That surely explained why her date had to resort to getting her out of prison. "But I'm sure Sabrina has told you as much already."

She hadn't. But J couldn't care less.

Erika continued. "I was informed by Sabrina that you may not be in the possession of a suitable dress for this incoming event, so she requested for my assistance in fitting you up." She glanced to the side. "And herself, of course."

There might have been the slightest hint of an exasperated eye roll at this observation, but it was gone as soon as J had detected it, and before she knew, she wasn't even sure anymore if she had seen right.

Erika smacked her lips. "Are we ready, my ladies?" Nonchalant murmur and shrugging were the only hints of an answer she got. Unfazed, Erika led the two other women into the shopping centre. It was a most unusual sight for the citizens of Celadon. They had an odd sense of pride in their tradition-conscious gym leader and weren't fazed anymore by her wearing a precious kimono in public. Still, there was something unsettling about the two women that followed her, one even known in her neighboring city, the other oddly familiar, though no one could really place the finger on where they had seen that face before…

They stopped in front of what J easily recognized as one of the more upper-class brand's shops, when Erika turned around and seemingly measured her size simply by looking at her. J crossed her arms in front of her, feeling strangely naked at this evaluation.

"Okay, you've got the broad shoulders, small waist, small hips…not as much bosom as Sabrina", due to their equally expressionless faces, it was unclear who felt more embarrassed by this assessment. "And short legs, my…" J had to suppress the urge to gnarl. Well, she wasn't exactly the born super model, was she? Not that this was much of her concern, her legs were meant to carry her out of a dangerous situation fast, not to teeter over a catwalk! "Let's see what we can work with here…"

About three hours and uncounted rounds of trying ons later, J finally had a rational, logical argument for buying her assortment of clothes online: It simply was less time-consuming. And if something didn't fit, you just had to re-package it and send it back instead of neatly folding it and finding the right coat-hanger.

The only advantage was that, in case you felt particularly depressed, you could try hanging yourself on said coat-hanger.

She supposed that it was also a matter of their new-accounted leader, Erika, being the most clothing-obsessed perfectionist she had ever met.

Then again, she could count the times she had spent considerable time with another woman not of her blood on one hand, so the pool of comparable individuals was very small.

Her observation that this ordeal took longer than expected had some foundation, though, as she noticed that her hostess had started showing minimal signs of desperation and annoyance as well. It might also be rooted in the fact that she and Erika had distinctly different notions of how the perfect dress shall look like.

"No." It was such a simple statement, and still, Erika continued to pluck at the string tie holders of the dress, cheekily trying to force the dress to stay down. For obvious reasons. For maximum cleavage.

J snickered behind the back of the two women. That might be the next slogan of a prominent fashion brand if not for its crudeness.

"Oh, come on. It looks good on you." Erika nodded to herself and if weren't below her standards to show any physical sign of agreement, J would have nodded. For someone who, that much she had had come to realize, didn't wear anything below a certain level of both comfort and regality, Sabrina looked particularly stunning in a well-fitted low-cut dress.

Not that J saw much of her front side, or had particularly tried to get a peek at it, no. But what she saw of her backside was enough to validate that observation, certainly.

"No. I'm not wearing something showing that much skin to a winter's ball." J had to admit that it took something of a keen mind to connect the level of nudeness to the date of the ball, but that didn't make the point Sabrina tried to make any more reasonable. Erika, obviously, agreed. "It's even your color!"

J raised an eyebrow. Whenever one was implied to have a favorite, fitting color, one expected things like purple, red, brown or, for all one cared salmon pink. To be known to favor black, though, implied one of the two things: Either one was in mourning, or they were a close-minded fetishist of the Goth scene. Neither were things she could really associate with the Saffron gm leader, though she supposed with her lack of emotions it would go unnoticed by her if she had recently suffered a loss in her family.

"Excuse me, as I have no idea about fashion…" That was an understatement, but J didn't think it would be that much of a necessary input to state as much. "But I have been informed that we are going to visit a ball, not a funeral."

There was a momentary pause as both gym leaders registered her input, and again, J wasn't sure if her eyes were belying her or not, but she could swear she saw the ghost of a snicker flicker across Sabrina's face.

Erika, on the other side, seemed to be positively embarrassed. "This is not a black dress!" She exclaimed, fluttered. "It's onyx-colored!"

J felt her eyebrow rise almost on its own volition again. That made exactly how much of a difference?

Erika made a pitiful obvious attempt at changing the topic, and almost instantly failed at that again, a natural reaction of someone whose main passion had just been questioned. "Now to you, Jean! Let's see, lighter hair, grey-ish blue, blue eyes, fair skin….let's go with something bright, but not too bright, something lightly colored, maybe something similar, geyish", that most certainly had not been a slip of the tongue, of course not",…maybe with a pattern, something like marble, or close to that." And with that, she rushed off into the depths of the hallstands, to be forever, or at least for a few hours, lost to the attires.

Sabrina quietly sneaked next to J, crossing her arms. Her discomfort at being placed in her revealing dress visibly for once. She was seeking a kind of comfort in the presence of someone who had been equally unwillingly placed in this situation, and who had yet to get the full brunt of Erika's design ideas.

J quietly smacked her tongue against her gum. "It doesn't look that bad on you…" She offered, in the absence of any other applicable topic.

There was a long pause in which J wondered if she had crossed the line, or if her comment- which had been the most honest attempt of a compliment she had done in pretty much all of her life, had been misunderstood.

Only to wonder since when she had started to care for another person's feeling, and scolded herself for becoming so liberal in the span of a few hours. It must have been the strain put on her face for staging full alertness for so long.

„You think so?"

Well, she wouldn't have uttered such a sentence if she had been trying to lie to her, now, would she?

"Yes."

Another silent pause, in which Sabrina seemed to nod in slow-motion, or otherwise tried to fight off the urge to nod off.

Before they had any time to strike off a conversation, Erika already hurried back to them, her arms packed full with coat hangers and dragging several dresses behind her in a brilliant display of how much she cared about clothes in the end. J felt herself taking in a deep breath and starting to shift from one food to the other, clearly in anticipation of the change interlude that was becoming her highlight of the day.

Around two hours, uncounted liters of sweat and several delightful giggles by Erika later, J had finally found something that preserved her dignity _and_ fit the occasion as well. Although she couldn't help but feel like a Donphan pressed into a tube of synthetic fabric, and probably moved just like one as well. Sturdy hiking boots didn't prepare your feet for tight-fitting slippers with heels, even if said heels were so whimsically small that Erika even seemed offended to call them by such a name.

The dress itself was pretty plain, a most basic of cuts, much higher than Sabrina's. Mainly because J didn't have as much as Sabrina to leave an impression, something that Erika didn't say out loud, but certainly thought, a fact which was obvious even if you weren't in the possession of the mind reading ability.

To make up for that, it was slit up quite high, something that J for once preferred. It would make it so much easier to ram her heel into another person's groin if it became necessary.

Erika dusted her hands off. Yet, if J had thought that the torture was over, she was in for an awful surprise. "Now, let's get onto the accessories." She paused for a moment as both Sabrina and J blinked, and waited until the wheels behind their eyes had started turning. "Well, I cannot send you out, looking so plainly! What kind of friend would I be, then?" One who prioritized her friends' feelings over the stupid codex made by money-hungry designers and fashion brands. "You need something to cover your neck, 'rina, otherwise, you look like a discolored Fearow! And Jean, I have the perfect plan for your outfit, just you'll wait and see!"

Wait and see and kill, it was more likely by now. J rolled her eyes and supposed that there was something to the cliché of men only grudgingly accompanying their significant others to such a shopping tour, and succumbing to exhaustion soon afterwards. You just couldn't help but feel your brain cells slowly drowning in bleach liquor.

Erika rushed off and was back in just a blink of an eye, carrying something that look like a baton, a bigger sweatband and something that was unmistakably a yet-black feather boa.

"Ta~da!" J shifted quickly to the side.

"Your turn", she said, nodding to the feather bow, marked by Sabrina's color and therefore, luckily, off her territory.

"No so fast, Jean!" Erika grinned, not knowing that usually, she would end up calcified for such a false threat. "This is for you!" And she handed her the stick and the sweatband, much to the discomfort of J.

"Do you smoke?"

"No?" J answered questioningly. She had never been one for smoking, despite the fact that it seemed to be a trademark of villainous people to show at least one sign of voluntary body demolition, whether it was substance abuse or plain masochism. She wasn't in for either (though by now, the latter could be debatable), as it hindered her order situation. No client would willingly pay a misshapen, shabby supplier.

Not to mention that it greatly affected one's endurance.

"Aw, that's too sad! I got you this cigarette holder, it fits the theme of your dress perfectly!" J, tired out by over five hours of mental and physical strain now, only managed to blink in confusion. Erika shrugged again, nonchalantly. "Well, I went with a roaring twenties theme for you two, I think that will work out greatly, especially if I get to work on your hair, ladies." By now, she looked like a lurking snake, ready to pump her deadly venom into the veins of her unsuspecting prey any moment.

That didn't put J's mind at ease, anyway.

Erika, on the other hand, went on. "I was thinking about getting you some small hat, or something, but I think a headband will work better on you. Nothing with flowers, though, or with gems, we don't want you to look like a hippie having fallen out of time, now, do we?" No, if one didn't want to wake up hanging in a tree the next morning, one didn't want J to look like anything even remotely resembling a hippie. The universe could only take so much confusion before it decided to fold in itself. "So something just with a plain fabric, no big peculiarities."

Erika turned to Sabrina. "You, on the other hand…" The grass type gym leader closed her eyes. "We've got full attention on your bosom, now we need to take any of that attention away from your neck, right? So you've got the feather boa. Coal-colored, fits the onyx of your dress just perfectly."

It wouldn't have killed her, now would it, to just plainly admit that both dress and accessory were black as the night, but that seemed to be considered an affront.

A deep sigh from Erika, either out of sheer felicity that her job here was nearly done, or out of exhaustion about what was still to come. One couldn't be sure in her case, anyway.

"Now that's out of the way…time to get you two your masks!"

Plain silence, followed by the nearly synchronous blinking of two mildly bewildered women, followed again by the polite coughing of Erika, who had been expecting such a reaction. Which didn't reduce her exasperation in any way.

"You _did_ read through the invitation, right? It does say there that the league wants to hold a masked ball this year."

"Yes." Sabrina had just the right amount of sass to formulate her answer in a way that fit Erika's question, yet didn't even carry along the notion of how she had actually forgotten to read the invitation to the end after panic of not having a suitable partner set on.

"Well, then, then things are clear! I'll be back right away, girls, just you wait! I'll make you the fanciest couple to have ever grazed the league with its presence!" Now we're talking about self-imposed challenges that might exceed one's limits.

J felt an involuntary twitch of her eyebrow as she glanced in the direction the dresser lady had went off to. It was a miracle she hadn't called in her henchmen yet in order to nuke the shopping center away from existence, but then again, resources were scarce, and she wasn't sure if it would be worthwhile to spend one of her precious bombs when a simple automatic rifle might do the job as well.

A silent, calm voice called her to reason, though. "Don't you just kill her yet." She looked to her side. Sabrina was staring ahead, just like her, with that same, unemotional mask drawn over her face again. "We still need her skills as a hairdresser." She turned her head to the side, and J wasn't sure if she wasn't imagining that small snicker. "Besides, it is my privilege to extinguish her, as she is still my colleague."

And with that, they shared something that could have almost been called a smile if not for its highly morbid nature.

"I'm back!" And the moment was swiftly ruined by Erika turning up right just when the two involuntary dance partners had found something they could share, even if it was just the mutual hate of a nearly uninvolved aide.

Erika, for her part, didn't seem to notice what had just conspired, as there was the chance she would have taken her heels and flee in case she had. Instead, she held up two simple, but still fashionable masks. One was bigger, covering not only the area around the eyes but also part of the forehead and cheeks, and had long, fluffy black feathers attached. The other was much smaller, grey in color and only had a velvety texture to it as adornment.

Erika giggled delightfully. "See, they're even in partner look! You should take the black one, Jean, and you take the grey one." All in all, she seemed positively pleased with her job.

Now it was time to hurry away, while also keeping your dignity and not appearing as if you frantically wanted to flew away from the shopping centre as fast as possible.

"I express my deepest gratitude for your help, Erika, and am thankful for your assistance." J just quietly nodded to that, hoping that this gesture carried her agreement.

Erika waved aside. "Oh, it was nothing. I mean, I even got some pleasure out of it. It was fun." There was a mysterious glistening in her eyes that made J uncomfortable. It seemed too easy to be let off the hook this easily, now, did it?

"I'll see it to that we'll meet before the ball again. Should I book a place or will we meet at yours?" J blinked. She seemed to be just a bit out of the loop to understand what exactly was being discussed right now, and she didn't feel comfortable by it one bit.

Erika shrugged. "Either sounds good. Just give me a call before, 'rina, right? So I can prepare." She winked and bowed goodbye before her unfortunate fashion victims. And as if on cue, J felt herself wisped away not a second later by the eerie powers of teleport again.

She only had a fraction of a second to wonder if there was even the question of who would pay for the wardrobe, or if teleporting away while wearing store interior was not considering thievery on this hemisphere, before she reappeared in the control room of her ship, her startled henchmen no less confused than she was.

She blinked, registered the nature of her surroundings and swiftly let herself fall onto her chair, while also wondering if she should attempt some way of communication in order to get the clothes she had worn before back. Her boots and an trench coat were not her most precious possession, as she in general found the motion that material possessions as precarious quite funny and silly, but it would be a shame to just leave them behind, especially when there was the not so small chance that they would give away her identity for better or worse.

She supposed, though, that with the psychic, chances were high that she would get her garments back sooner or later by the means of teleportation.

She propped her chin in her palm, and glared at the henchmen that were staring at her as if she had just grown a second head.

Or, alternatively, shown up in a dinner robe and feather-adorned mask. Either seemed to have about the same probability, so she couldn't fully blame them for their bewilderment.

"What?" She hissed either way, as a matter of principle or because it was a good way of relieving stress that didn't involve physical exercise on her part, and physical punishment on theirs.

Hiccupping, they went back to their jobs and she was back in her own mind, for the first time in hours able to even start to process the events that had just taken place.

Deciding that such an analysis would be beyond her imagination any way, she settled on the same strategy that had carried her through a full week of blissful innocence before: Taking a blind eye to it, and pretending that she was not going to rob a coordinators' convention in a gown.

It was a nice strategy, after all. And when a well-know spectacle repeated itself the following week, and an overstrained henchman came in, arms behind his head, and almost managed to tell her that they had a guest again before it became apparent that she was to be teleported again, her strategy was so immensely successful that J was not at all prepared.

This time, though, the unannounced gym leader commanded her to get her dress and accessories and shoes and prepare herself as much as she could for the incoming winter's ball.

Now, there _were_ times in which one ordered J to do something, and lived. They were sparse, but they were there. And being a close to omnipotent psychic who managed to totally petrify J by the unheralded announcement that the ball was going to take place this very night was one of these occasions. In fact, J was so very alarmed that her façade broke for a moment, with her lurking henchmen as witnesses. She didn't even have enough time to remind herself that she would need to beat them up with a metal pipe later, as she had to hurriedly slip into the dress while at the same time not forgetting to put on her unmentionables.

Speaking of…

"No, you don't have to come in and help me!" She nearly shrieked in a very uncharacteristically moment, but, let's be honest here, who had seriously expected J to ever attend a league's ball? Certainly not she herself, as she still felt somewhat out of this world, even as she cautiously adjusted her headband. By now, she wasn't sure if the worst outcome would be to be recognized, or to sprain her ankles while trying to manage these heels.

When she walked out of her room, she had to resist the urge to tuck at her dress, and had to resist the urge to strangle someone even more. She supposed she could spare some henchmen, but as the psychic hushed her along, there didn't seem to be any time for such a stress relief.

A strangle, tickling feeling overcame her, one that she would probably never get used to, although she had to admit that Teleport in general was a convenient ability. If it didn't come with the weird tendency to ignore all kinds of commonalities and all rules of the space-time continuum.

"Wonderful, you're on time!"

J had to suppress a groan. It had been a week, a quiet, peacefully, generous week, since she had heard this voice the last time and certainly, the perception hadn't changed one bit. Whenever this woman, Erika of Celadon, was close, it likely meant that another humiliation conga was about to take place with her as the special lead.

And she, the naïve, insane levels of naivety in this case, had hoped that once she had her dress, it was _over_. Of course not. She should have known better. A woman with the right wardrobe was only half-ready. Her outfit was only completed by the right hairdo, and makeup, both things of which Erika was a self-confessed expert in. And both of which things that J abhorred for the simple fact that they took up precious time she didn't have. She couldn't wait for her nail polish to dry while her client's Pokemon got away!

Now that she looked at the tablecloth spread out before Erika, she supposed slow drying nail polish would be the last of her worries, ever. Heck, she couldn't even identify half of the instruments that were presented to her! Was that woman really going to be her make-up artist of the day or actually going to remove her appendix with a feather brush?

"No worries, Jean, you're in good hands. We'll first do something about your hair- and yours, Sabrina, don't you think you can get away this time!-" why was J suddenly so intrigued about that apparent 'first time' and why was she so very sure that this was a constant source of embarrassment for her partner in almost crime from the sudden stunned look on her face? ", and then I'll do your make up no time, sweety, I've got all the essentials here with me anyways. And then we'll see to that you arrive in time at the league HQ, right?" Erika winked again. J wasn't sure how to take this, except that she was very sure that the grass type leader did not actually know how to teleport and, given that they were in Celadon in a back room of the gym, Erika was unlikely to carry them to Indigo on her back.

In all the countless hours J had spent with Erika, she hadn't as much inquired serious information from the elegant lady, either out of lack of interest or because she feared the answer in one way or another. For once, though, she was actually curious as to what the gym leader was gonna do about her hair. She herself had never much cared about it, had kept it short in order to keep herself from the humiliation that was an enemy actually pulling on her hair, and had therefore not the slightest idea of how one was actually supposed to get a decent hairstyle out of that bush of hers.

We're talking about the top bush, for those whose minds wandered of in-between.

Not that the other option didn't intrigue J, but not in the same fashion, and certainly not in a public setting.

"Oh, that's absolutely no problem", Erika explained while combing through J's wet hair. "You see, women during the twenties finally dared to cut their hair short and therefore, there are many variations of short hair cuts that work well nowadays as well." Erika smacked her tongue against her cheek. "In fact, what I'm going to do to you today is known as the finger wave. It's well-known, and should look fabulous on you. Now, it's not the easiest haircut- in fact, the variation I'll be doing will be a bit more difficult than what can be achieved with curling irons, but it won't last as long, and I got the impression you're not in for having to deal with your hair all week long." Well, now that was an observation J could certainly agree with, even if she didn't have the slightest idea of what Erika was talking about, otherwise.

"Regarding you…" Erika looking up, glancing in Sabrina's direction, who almost flinched. "You know."

The psychic glanced aside, and, if J wasn't so sure it was a combination of her imagination and of having sharp shampoo in her eyes, she might have seen the psychic honestly gulping with fear.

Whatever it was that the psychic was afraid of, J found that she couldn't share her reservations. While she was very sure she would never be able to reproduce the hairstyle Erika had done on her own, unless she kidnapped a hair dresser, she nevertheless found it quite refreshing.

Also, it lowered the chances of being recognized significantly as well.

Erika nodded to herself, obviously satisfied by her achievement as well. "That's going to leave an impression on the other gym leaders, for sure." J noticed that the psychic seemed to tense at these words as well, but then again, it might have just been the anticipation of what was yet to come. A question which would soon be answered.

"Now, to you…" Sabrina's anxious shifting in the chair almost became clinical.

"As agreed, eh?"

If one didn't know he had to look for a nod, he might as well have mistaken Sabrina to be totally free of reaction.

Erika rolled her eyes, snipping the air with her scissors for emphasize. "We agreed on this, 'rina, didn't we?"

Whatever it was that they had agreed on, it was most certainly not Sabrina stomping out of the room and fleeing the scene.

"For Arceus' sake!" Erika uttered a sigh that might have been an exasperated groan. "I had a feeling that she would pull some stunt…but for her to actually go through with it. "

J raised an eyebrow.

„I am afraid I do not fully get what you're talking about." And now she wasn't sure if she wanted to hear the full story.

Erika shrugged helplessly. "Well, she got this thing with her hair going on, she doesn't want it to be cut, like, ever. When she came for me for help, I said I would do it, provided that she would actually let me cut her hair. Which is like a Holy Grail for me. Been trying to get her under my fingers for years and now I thought, I got her." Erika sighed.

J's eyebrow stayed were it had been before, that is, in raised position. Given that she herself couldn't give a damn about her hair cut, it seemed to be a bit, ah, of an exaggeration to try to achieve a lifelong dream in the form of cutting a fellow colleague's hair, but here she was.

And the league had the guts to call her the anarchic one.

Erika took a deep breath. "Thankfully, I anticipated this, so I came prepared."

J wondered if it was possible to have a cramp in one's forehead. She wasn't sure what to expect now. A lasso, a complicated trap, calling the national Rangers brigade or right away awaited an exorcist?

"Come with me, Haunter, we've got to get your mistress back in here."

J had wanted, honestly wanted to question Erika if she was seriously considering the help of a ghost/poison type dual type Pokemon, one that was, as far as she knew, not even in her possession, against a psychic who hadn't broken a sweat dealing with her Drapion, who had the advantage of being partly dark type.

Yet J had not been informed about Haunter's peculiar nature, and its tendency to act out overly stagily sketches.

Erika told J calmly to wait while she would go out with Haunter and try to rouse up the rogue gym leader. As it became obvious, Sabrina wasn't let go so far, as a few minutes later, the hairdresser and the ghost came back, in tow. Now J was fairly sure it was the psychic who tip-toed behind the ghost, but had she just been asked to judge by behavior alone, she would have said that Erika had went with the less plausible solution and hired a look-a-like.

For the psychic was screeching and fidgeting, held in control against her will, and obviously protesting these facts as loud as possible. J was morbidly curious as to how the woman and the ghost managed to keep the powerful psychic under control, but didn't dare to ask in case the same method could one day be used against her.

Erika huffed and ordered for Haunter to let the psychic go once she was positioned above the chair J had just vacated. There had to be some element of parapsychological control the ghost executed over the psychic, but again, J was careful not to let her curiosity overtake her façade.

No sooner than control over her limbs was given back to her, Sabrina used her sole chance to try to make a bolt for it again, only to be stopped in her track by Erika tripping her.

J wondered how much of her reputation would come out of this deal unharmed. At least she had a hard time stopping herself from snickering in response.

Erika rolled her eyes. "Sabrina, we did talk about this, didn't we?!"

There was no answer, except for a whining grumble that sounded both as if the impaired woman wanted to wail and murder at the same time. If she weren't alive by all means, she could have been impersonating a banshee.

Erika sighed. "Well, I guess I could modify it a bit so that you don't lose all of your mane. What do you say?"

In response, Sabrina grabbed her tuft from behind and signed a precise measurement to be cut off. Of about half an inch.

J snickered.

"Oh come one! A bit more!"

One inch.

"You gotta work with me here, otherwise, I refuse to do any more services for you. Ever."

Grudgingly, her fingers slipped up a bit more, indicating about…well, if one's generous, about two inches.

"Are we seriously going to bargain for every inch now?!"

A nod.

"Oh for the love of…" Erika nodded to Haunter, just as Sabrina's eyes widened and it seemed as if she would unleash a tornado in the middle of the room.

J, who was certain that no matter whose will triumphed the others, she was about to witness a blood bath either way, turned away for she didn't want to see two women scratching each other's eyes out with a scissor and bare finger nails respectively.

Around half an hour later, the deed was done, and somehow, the only arguably dead individual in the room was still the blithe ghost Pokemon.

Though if one didn't know better, he would guess that someone had just run over Sabrina's pet cat. It was a truly unpleasing view, for she did her darnest to look as unemotional as always, but everything in her composure betrayed her.

Now, J's knowledge about haircuts was, as stated, very limited and it was rare for her to know about a style before it was written in big fat letters before her eyes, but she was caught up on fashion enough to know that what Erika had whipped up was a very simple bob cut, albeit with the hair left on about shoulder-length. Or, in Sabrina's words, close enough to balding that it was embarrassing for her walk out of the room without a full-face wimple.

Erika rolled her eyes. She had done this so many times in the past hour that J was honestly worried for her sight even if she didn't believe in the old folktale of it causing strabismus. "Heh, see the positives…no one will recognize you now, neither in Saffron nor between the other gym leaders." Erika was still not fully done with her beefing up, as she was still applying make-up to the slightly grumpy psychic. "They'll all wonder who this beautiful young lady is, who floats into the room accompanied by her mature, noble ladyfriend."

J was sure it was neither fair nor polite to be snickering right now, but if there was any scenario she would certainly write off from happening, it was this one. While 'floating' in a more basic sense was certainly within her escort's abilities, it was unlikely to be within the spectrum of activities she would participate in this night.

Nor was she her ladyfriend, if that hadn't been all that obvious but it was better to leave Erika under the delusion that they were more than a mere chance acquaintanceship.

"Okay, et viola! Finished!"

J craned her neck. Not that she was honestly interested in what Erika had done, she was simply curious if she still had all of her ten fingers, or if Sabrina had finally started weeping in the middle of being made up.

To her surprise, and slight disappointment, she had to admit, the psychic seemed to have abandoned all drama for the time being, and simply stood up with the faintest discomfort. She glanced at the clock ticking away, before politely asking Erika if she wanted to take the opportunity to be teleported to the league HQ together with them right away. J had to admit that Erika taking her up on that offer was gutsy. If J had been in her shoes, she would have telefragged Erika 'on accident'. Or left her some fifty miles north of the headquarters in the middle of nowhere in the mountains. That, she was sure, was not the appropriate retribution for someone cutting off your hair, but usually, cutting your hair didn't involve mourning each strand individually.

And usually, as J already had the gnawing feeling, was out partying anyway.

End Part Two


	3. Chapter 3

Part Three

Getting used to the feeling of being teleported around was one thing, but it didn't automatically include getting used to the feeling of having to take in a monumentality different environment from one second to the other. Just a second ago, she had been in a heated, neon enlightened small back room of a greenhouse gym, which spoke length about the temperature in the house. And just like that, she reappeared on a rocky side road in the middle of the mountains, surrounded by deep forests, cliffs, valleys, and, not to mention, snow.

Deep snow. Deep, fresh, icy mountain snow.

J immediately made a bee line to the entrance, feeling her ankles starting to freeze off already. Not being forced to take a cab and driving through the secluded wilderness had its advantages, for sure, like not being forced to pack thick coats or jackets, but it also forced you to endure the forcefulness of mother nature for the moment.

Sabrina barely had time to stop her before she would have crashed the party, likely in more than one sense, as the doors in front of her were, in fact, locked.

Erika followed just a scant bit later. "Wait, Jean. We'll have to make our entrance known, first."

J snickered. That shouldn't prove to be a problem, at all.

Someway, the possibility that this ball might be invitation-only hadn't crossed her mind. Now, as she followed the two gym leaders, it started to make an enormous amount of sense to her. The sheer mass of paparazzi located at the front entrance of the league building was disconcerting even for her, and gave reason to the fact that they had appeared at the closed back door, and were now fiddling with a prominent side entrance that seemingly every gym leader and partner knew about, but was as good as invisible to the paparazzi. She was honestly baffled as to how this could happen, as they were within plain view of the dozens of camera-wielders, and still, all they did was talking to their sound engineers, and occasionally reaching out with their arms as to indicate where the objects of their desires might hide.

Which made it comically amusing, as that was exactly where they were standing and waiting.

"Seems as if Will's been showcasing again…" Erika exclaimed, although not to J in general.

There might have been an indifferent shrug in the way Sabrina's shoulders moved, or else she was simply waving away the coldness in her limbs.

It wasn't as if J was particularly interested in deciphering the next to nonexistent body language of her escort.

In the few seconds that it had taken Sabrina to react, Erika had managed to catch the attention of her own attendance as well. Mostly by wavering and screaming obnoxiously, as if to drive the point home that the paparazzi could neither see nor hear them, result of the showcase of the abilities of yet another psychic. As much as it made up for a fascinating show, J found herself irritated at the various ways these abilities could be utilized in everyday life. It made preparing against them all the more bothersome.

Erika's partner was, haphazardly enough, also a woman. A pretty unfortunate looking hag, J might have said, if she hadn't been in the company of someone who might make her head explode if she adopted the wrong choice of words. Yet honestly, with all the effort Erika had taken into preparing J and Sabrina for the dinner party, it spoke volumes as to how ill-prepared her so called partner was. Her massive crop of hair was bound into two enormous pigtails to the left and right side of her head. Even worse, her hair was the color of badly digested puke, and while that was one thing that was genetically enforced on every individual, it was by no means something that couldn't be changed with a good dose of hair dye and the right choice of color.

As far as that went, J was sure that anything was better than the current color, with the sole exception of going bald. That much, she admitted, she had to give her own host.

And to top that of- as if showcasing that horrible color was not enough of an embarrassment, the woman had apparently dug her dress out of a garbage can and combined it with the ingredients of a well decomposing compost. Given the nature of their gym, it might have been a logical choice, yet it was anything but fitting. In fact, J was sure she had seen at least one video game character walking around in a dress made out of moss green, leaf-shaped patches of clothing.

Not that she played many video games. She just had to make sure that her henchmen played for no longer than three minutes a day.

And not beat her high score while they were at it.

All in all, it might have been for the best, J mused, that the theme of the party forced the girl to wear a peacock-inspired mask which did not only hide her face, but also parts of her unfortunate haircut.

"You look lovely, Heather." Erika exclaimed.

J was amazed at how ruthlessly some people could lie to someone's face.

"My, that's nice of you to say, Erika." Of course it was nice. Because saying "You look like you belong into the bio-waste container" took more guts than Erika had.

"Your company is also the most delightful I have ever seen." Which likely meant that Heather had spent the last gym leader balls under a rock.

As "under a rock type gym leader" would certainly clash with her proclaimed sexuality.

It was either that or J was in for something regarding the beaming personalities of the other gym leaders and elite four trainers.

Sabrina gave the slightest hint of a professional nodding to that socially enforced observation, with J mimicking her in delay.

"Shall we go in?" Heather asked, holding out her hand for Erika to take it and beckoning the other women inside into the luxurious house. The question itself, as were most such, was needless, as the gesture itself implied the correct answer and therefore, physical act anyway. Still, it seemed to take her host a moment to register this, as they suddenly found themselves alone in front of the doors, with their company already disappearing fast into the brightly lit corridor.

"It's awfully convenient..." J asked, before finding herself smacking her lip against her gum in an unusual display of uncertainty of wording. She quickly dismissed the lapse into non-professionalism. "…that everyone has to wear a mask today."

She, with all the recent proof in mind, should have known that indirect implications were the last thing her social in adept gym leader would react to. Yet she was still a bit miffed when all she got was a slight nod and the soft sound of foot tapping that indicated Sabrina using a very human way to make her leave. J sighed and followed her, taking note to keep her guard up. Just in case.

Apparently, Erika and her partner had already taken care of the invitation check. J didn't know if she should feel surprised anymore by the fact that the invitations were printed on old-fashioned deckle edge paper, complete with a blood red wax seal and a golden colored cord. It was almost too clichéd to be real.

But then, she was waiting in a hall decorated with heavy, purple brocade drapes and burning torches. She snickered as she noticed the fire-extinguishers prominently hidden behind glass coffins. Hypocrisy was hardly a word the league should utter.

To be honest, there was a tiny, persistent sparklet of anxiety in the middle of her stomach when she overheard the conversation Sabrina was having with the bouncer. A not so tiny part of her was half-expecting special squad forces to break through the expensive, gold-trimmed windows and arrest her on the spot, but the most that happened was the bulky, suit-wearing man taking a double-take when registering Sabrina and J's names, as he apparently couldn't decide what was more baffling this moment: The fact that the Saffron gym leader showed up with an visibly older woman in tow, or that she had shown up at all.

Some mind reader would have taken offense at the fact that he briefly analyzed if J was old and physically resembling her enough to be her mother, but Sabrina had long since forgone all attempts to take offense at any obscure thoughts that were involuntarily thrown at her.

Hadn't she, she would have ended up blowing up the building before even entering the main halls, or alternatively ending the night with a league full of dolls.

Not that she didn't keep that option open, either way.

In the short time that she had been given to prepare, J had promised to herself that she wouldn't let her impressionability show, even, or rather especially if she was made sufficiently speechless at what she was seeing. This moment, though, it was hard to say even for J herself if she was honestly surprised by the inner ward of the league, or taken aback in a more sarcastic way by the crooked dignity that was on plain display here. Maybe she wasn't as much of a true mind reader as Sabrina was, but her métier, so to say, gave her a true insight into what was honesty and what was not.

And no one could tell her that the sound of bell-like giggling that desecrated her ears was actually meant to be faithful.

She had quickly decided for herself that hiding in the shadows and only pretending to be attending at all was the best strategy she could conjure for the time being, only to be thrown off balance when a historically incorrect clothed ninja girl shushed her out of her hiding place which she was currently occupying in order to hide from her boyfriend. Or greatest asshole in the world who had broken her heart on several occasions and who she absolutely had no crush on anymore. Her wording on this matter was not conclusive.

J slowly strolled through the hall, mostly unbothered by anyone while taking in the individuals that could very much become her next victims or enemies. Or clients. She was certain not all of them were above the kind of business she ventured in.

At least, she was unbothered until a young man approached her, a meeting which caused intensive feelings of dread in J stomach.

J thought she recognized the Pewter gym leader even behind the gem adorned mask he was wearing, and cursed inwardly that of all the people that could have bumped into her, the only one that did was one of the very few who could reasonably remember her.

He didn't.

(After all, it was Brock's younger _brother_ Forrest that J bumped into, but for someone who had not been informed about the size of the Harrison family, and the uncanny resemblance of the children among themselves, the mix-up was excusable.)

But that didn't mean that their meeting was comfortable in any way.

Now, Forrest, for some reason, could string together the uncomfortable feeling of caution in the depths of his very focused mind, but that feeling was swiftly overlain by his natural instinct to spread his genes, which clearly ran in the family, after all. Which took on an urgent importance when the woman in question was likely approaching menopause.

As it stands, Forrest came out of this attempt alive and still in full control of his entire body, but sadly, the same cannot be said for his dignity or fertility.

Almost growling by now, but regretting not staying in direct vicinity of the psychic, J scurried off. For all it was worth, it was easy spotting the black-clad woman in-between all these birds of paradise with their fancy costumes and overly long dresses that made it hard not to step on any appendage that fell like a curtain behind them, yet only served well in mopping the floor. In all honesty, she was half-tempted to call off the charade of being a non-smoker and light a cigarette just to be able to burn holes into their fancy polyester capes.

She found the psychic talking to yet another fabulous individual that had mixed up carnival with the masked ball. So much purple on a single person should have been illegal, but if there truly had been a fashion police, she would have needed them to raid the whole hall and still bring in reinforcements, likely.

„…which would make it the last time Clair would have seen her socks, but if you ask me, she just wasn't looking for them in the right places- oh, here your ladyfriend actually is!"

J took a mental note of how it seemed to be physically impossible to surprise any psychic, as they became aware of your presence even if you were still ten feet away from them and facing their back.

"Why don't you introduce me to her, hm, Sabrina?" J decided for herself to walk around him (her? it? It was actually _hard_ to tell in the case of this overgrown eggplant!) and ignore him completely. It wasn't a matter of courtesy, but rather of not having to open her mouth and accidently blow her cover, considering that she was approaching someone who could easily rip open her soul as well. It was an upsetting thought, frightening even, but it wasn't any more negative than the indication of how she had only managed to get past thirty minutes of the whole dinner party so far and still had to survive another two hours.

She came to a halt next to Sabrina, and nodded to the strange individual facing them. He- and J still hoped that she was right with her gender assumption, had short, neatly cut lightly purple hair and similarly colored eyes, a not so ugly, boy-like face and wore a purple-trimmed black mask that sparsely covered the area around his eyes. Strangely, though, one eye patch was covered with a milky, opaque piece of fabric, leaving J to wonder if there was actually an eye behind it. All in all, it was a shame that his sense of fashion was so throughout damaged and dominated by a single, obnoxious color, for he looked somewhat handsome in overall package.

"She's named Jean Hunter." Or rather, she had named herself so, but J wasn't about to let anyone , let alone a pack of two psychics, know that for the moment. "She agreed to accompany me tonight." As if that hadn't been obvious. Then again, there might have been the slight overall chance that she _hadn't_ agreed to that, and Sabrina would have still lugged her in behind her.

There was a pause as Sabrina apparently struggled with the correct sequence of protocol. "Jean, this is William Bender. He's the psychic type first Elite Four of the united Indigo region."

J again nodded, though taken aback when the man in front of her bowed deeply and took her hand for a hint of a kiss. There had been a time in her life when she would have blushed at the display of such fine manners, but that time was long behind her.

Nowadays, her first instinct had been to cut his head off, but that was equally inappropriate for her.

"It is a pleasure to meet you, Miss Hunter. Say, how did you make Miss Winter's acquaintance?"

Sabrina, rudely foregoing protocol entirely for a moment, answered for her. "I met her in Saffron's municipal prison."

J forced herself not to raise an eyebrow. Was this going to become some sort of running gag? Either way, Will took this much easier than Erika did, as his sole reaction was the hint that his eyebrow might have raised behind his mask. "I see…."

He coughed politely and excused himself to find his own partner, just the moment when someone else decided to take center stage. Sabrina, certainly not any more interested in the upcoming speech than J was, still took her hand and led her to the front of the hall, where a podium extended itself over the whole length of the room, allowing the presenter to make himself known to everyone in the unfortunate vicinity and beyond.

Even though J knew enough about the dragon type champion to recognize his face, she still was baffled at his appearance. If she hadn't known and hoped any better, she would have expected him to announce his coronation any moment. Whatever it was that he was wearing, it looked like the bastard cross between a cloak and a bathrobe. All in the brightest of reds and whites and golds that one could find. It was, perhaps, both upsetting and disappointing that he hadn't opted for running amok with the theme anyway and wear a jewel adorned crown, but J supposed that that might have been, forgive the bluntness, cocky. Even for him, the self-declared dictator of Indigo if not for old Charles.

All things considered, it was probably for the best that it was only his old, Venetian-style mask that seemed to be made out of some kind of metal, though real gold was certainly not included in it.

He spoke at length about the unity of the league, about its achievements and its importance, and how they, together, were the greatest nightmare of injustice and crime.

The unity of the league. Not his speech. That was only the greatest daydream of otologists.

"That's the same speech he has been rehashing every year." J heard someone complaining to her left. She glanced aside and noticed that it was a red-haired girl in her early teens who stood next to the unfortunate leech she had scared off. She was, strangely enough, wearing something that was likely supposed to make her look like a beautiful mermaid, but, in truth, only made her look like a retarded fish out of the water in the way she had to literally drag her feet across the floor.

Lance took a deep breath. "I am also glad to announce that the league has managed to accomplish an important blow to organized Pokemon trafficking this year. "

"That's new!" The girl exclaimed next to her, honestly baffled at this change of course. J, though, had just stopped listening to the teen, as what she was fearing was slowly becoming hardened truth.

"In fact, just recently, with the help of one of our Kanton gym leaders, we managed to get hold of one of the most feared criminals of Sinnoh." Lance glanced around the room. J wondered if his eyes lingered, a fact, a little longer on her face, but she was fairly sure it was just her imagination. It _had_ to be her imagination, anything else meant certain death.

For her or the sum of the gym leaders lingering around her.

"We have captured the ruthless Hunter J, known for stealing and selling hundreds, if not thousands of Pokemon."

"Two thousand, eight hundred and forty-four." J whispered, a bit miffed at getting underestimated.

"Please, Sabrina, grace us and come up here, would you?" Lance offered to the psychic gym leader. J quickly sidestepped her in order to drive as much attention away from herself as she could, while Sabrina's face stayed unreadable. It was hard to say what was going on in the head of someone who was just congratulated for imprisoning a criminal she had, not much later, freed herself.

And brought along, almost for emphasize.

J, for all her part, was caught between bursting into laughter at the sheer implausibility of the situation, or staying as quiet and invisible as she could. Her sanity was almost taken over by the insanity of the moment, but she held herself together firmly.

She was also impressed by how easily Sabrina played her cards and hid the truth, the plain truth standing no twenty feet away from her from the public. She didn't speak much, but if one had actually listened to her and not closed up their ears at the first sign of Lance speaking up, they might have actually believed that Sabrina took in the glory of overcoming J's modern technology and cunningness herself and getting her behind prison bars for a long time. While, all in all, it hadn't even been a week, and Sabina had ensured that J got out without a scratch.

All the time, she never even did so much as glance in J's direction, as if she was aware of the irony that was almost tangible in the room. Not almost, in truth. The irony was standing a few feet away from her, wearing a shoulder-less gravel-colored dress and empty cigarette-holder. J supposed that if anyone had known that she was here, in the middle of them, standing with crossed arms and a fake-champagne glass in one hand that was actually filled with bottled water, they would have fled the hall in panic before Sabrina even had the chance of descending from the podium.

"Thank you for your wise words." Lance nodded, taken the microphone back from the reluctant psychic. Wise words that carried along as many philosophical lore as a cooking book.

"Thanks for speaking at all." Someone to J's left whispered in a not so well hidden sarcastic voice. It was, apparently, well known that it was highly unusual for Sabrina to show up at all. Something that Lance, of course, had to lampshade.

"I must admit, I am very happy that you're attending this year's winter's ball, Sabrina. It is a pleasure to see you this elegant and social today."

Yes, J was getting surer and surer that the entire league was made out of highly dangerous individuals who could lie to your face without betraying the smallest kind of dishonesty.

"Now, allow me the question- and I'm sure everyone here is just as curious as I am, if not even more, but who have you brought along for today's ball?" Lance winked.

J half expected Sabrina to repeat her story from before. After all, third time's the charm, eh?

She wasn't sure if she would actually survive being put in the spotlight this way. It was fairly likely that her nightmare of the special police squads crashing the party would come true that way. And the party would finally end in an epic clash between the forces of good and evil, which would likely make it the most rememberable winter's ball ever since Jasmine had accidently poured red wine over Clair's dress, calling the wrath of the dragon clan upon her.

Yet, Sabrina surprised her with an astonishingly dry answer that was hardly an answer and yet, would have to suffice for everyone. "I'm here with a recent acquaintance of mine."

And that, dears, wasn't even a lie, J mused with the slightest bit of a smile.

Sabrina simply refused to say any more on the matter, and emphasized it by walking down the stage without so much as a second glance in Lance's direction, who had only time to blink before he had registered her leaving. The psychic joined the other leaders and J back in front of the stage, carefully enough not to avoid J's presence, and yet, staying away from her for a while so as not to draw attention to their unusual connection.

Once Lance had finished talking more and more nonsense that no one would remember coming the next two minutes, though, J found the distance between her and Sabrina strangely melting away, until they were standing side by side again.

„Not badly done there", J whispered, taking the chance to put her gratefulness in as few words as she could. Again, Sabrina nodded in a way that made it seem her neck was not in the possession of any strong muscles and rather made out of inflexible metal that only made the tiniest of movements possible.

General bustling began, as Lance announced the dinner gala to be opened. Which, in the dozens of pairs of ears all around them only meant one thing: Food. And free food on top of that!

Individuals representing the elite of the country suddenly turned into ravenous animals as soon as their deepest survival instincts were triggered. Not to procreate, that came later.

J mused that there was a certain irony to the fact of being presented with lobster and caviar when, if it hadn't been for this miraculous turn of event, the most that she could have hoped for at this moment were mashed potatoes made from packet powder, cold hamburgers, meat not included and artificially colored vegetables that were only one genome away from learning how to speak.

Which, given that she didn't have any kind of exquisite taste either way, wouldn't have bothered her.

"I must say, I'm surprised…"

J looked up. Across from her, the little mermaid with her bright red hair was seated, though unlike her fictional counterpart, she did have a voice very much. Though, if she would have been able to enchant any man with her singing, that was an entirely different question.

The girl coughed politely, apparently having difficulty arranging her lobster correctly, or either having a hard time eating sea food in general. If it had been just her costume, one could have come to the conclusion that she was currently cutting through her childhood friends. "I mean, I'm quite surprised…" She nodded to Sabrina, fish fork pointing threateningly in her general direction, as her common sense had gotten ahead of her and went down the drain. "I did not know you had a girlfriend…" Her voice trailed off. Apparently, word had gotten around that J was, after all, Sabrina's accompany, as much as both loathed realizing that. It meant that they had to play their charade even more honestly if only for a few more hours.

"I don't." Something that Sabrina was quite successful about, obviously.

J took in a deep breath. She was nearing the point where all of this became just one big game to her, yet without a clear mark of how points were distributed, and the lines between winner and loser were shimmering away in a display of joyful insignificance of the sheer absurdity of all of it.

"I don't, either", she interrupted the two gym leaders nonchalantly. "There is a merely a temporal arrangement, made out of necessaries and accords."

"Indeed." Sabrina chimed her agreement. "As soon as the league's ball is over, we will go our separate ways."

The younger gym leader's face fell, if only for a moment. "That's sad", she muttered. "You look actually cute together, you know?"

J was graceful for the occasion of having just put a piece of the lobster into her mouth she could convincingly choke on. Sabrina, though, didn't have this advantage, and even if she had had, it was uncertain if she would have used it at all. It remained equally unsure if she had actually intended to show any reaction at all.

"That is a polite observation, Misty, yet it has no factual basis. Let it be emphasized that we have no attraction to each other, sexual or otherwise." And with that, she glanced at J, as if to encourage her to show her approval. Which J would have done, had she not actually been in the process of removing a stubborn piece of shell from her throat.

"Hm…" Misty, as the girl was apparently called (and from the naming requirements of the gym leaders and from her costume, as J waged a guess, a water type gym leader) put a finger to her chin and appeared deep in thought. "Speaking of observations, I couldn't help but notice that your face seems familiar…Jean, wasn't it?"

J nodded, her neck having become just as stiff as Sabrina's had been before, without the help of any muscle-related poison save for the internal venom of dread.

Again, Misty taped her finger against her chin. "You wouldn't happen to…ah, I do not know, have been around Kanto before, you know?"

J tried to hide the knife as imperceptible as she could beneath the table. If worst came to worst, she still had some way of defense on her, and maybe, it wouldn't have to come to that if she could cut through the girl's throat before, maybe in an unnoticed moment in the women's restroom.

She did catch Sabrina's disapproving nod, though. In a psychic's repertoire, there were less bloody ways of disposing of someone. Ways she wasn't adverse to.

"No, not as far as I know." She lied, scratching the tip of her nose as she did so. And again, it was even per se a lie, she hadn't done many businesses in Kanto yet. Not enough to be publicly known as a menace here, anyway.

"Hm…" Still, Misty didn't let the topic go, urging both Sabrina and J into irritation. "I was just, ah you know…" Misty began to giggle uncomfortably. "Your face…it reminded me of the wanted posters that have been all around the train stations, you know, of that criminal that has been arrested recently, what was her name again…"

J opened her mouth, half expecting either herself or Sabrina to comically slip out of role her and announce her temporary name anyway, but somehow, both of them managed to catch their tongues in time, even if it looked like she had choked on asparagus, in Sabrina's case.

J, though, decided after a moment of strategic thinking to throw all caution out of the window and be as straight as she could be without declaring herself outright stupid and with the fct lingering behind her that she was on a sort of date with another woman. Which she probably still was, but ah, it was better to rush the attack in case one was ambushed instead of delaying the inevitable, right?

"Oh, of course. That's no coincidence, I think. After all, I am that woman, who has been bailed out of prison by her own captor and now, I am attending the gym leader's ball, right in the middle of all of you unsuspecting fools, planning my revenge by stealing and selling all of your Pokemon into cheap Orrean brothels." She took a short sip of champagne, waiting for the impact. "Ridiculous, isn't it?"

There was another pause at the opposite site of the table, before it was broken by a light, girlish giggle. "Of course…ridiculous it is, really. I should have known, sorry for offending you, Jean. You have a great sense of humor, you know?"

"Oh, no, you're overselling me, Misty." J grinned. "Life has a great sense of humor. I am merely the vessel to comment on it occasionally."

She glanced at her side, and this time J was sure she wasn't imagining the cheeky smile on the psychic's face.

J was sure that she wouldn't be able to move, much less _dance_ after the seven course menu that had stuffed her up to the point where she felt like a bowl of granite. She wasn't sure how her acquaintance managed to still practically float through the room, but she seemed much less impaired by the food digestion than nearly everyone else was.

It was, therefore, the greatest idea in the history of league related ideas that Lance decided to open the dance just this moment. As much as members of the league could be false friends, as holey could be their memory, it seemed.

A nervous shuffle went through the hall as everyone scurried off to find their respective dancing partner, with a few hopeless souls attempting to snag a more preferable companion for the first dance as long as their designated escort did not watch. That general confusion was utilized by Sabrina and J to make a dash for it and hide behind the huge marble pillars, for neither had any desire to fulfill the dancing request of the champion, neither with each other nor with any other attendee.

Sadly, their plans were quickly shot down.

"Ah, here you are!" Both Sabrina and J, who had just made themselves comfortable in strangely similar, arm-crossed postures, looked up to see the psychic elite four walking up to them with a wide grin and arms open nearly as wide, as if he wanted to give them the biggest, and deadliest hug of his life. "I was looking for you."

J was very content with just ignoring him for the moment, but that was, given his obnoxious presence, simply not possible. "I was hoping to see you two during the opening dance." He nearly bowed before them, but in the end, it made him just look as if he had a particular bad backache, or, as they were all just coming from the dinner, his point of gravity having shifted forwards gravely.

"We're not going to dance." J answered for the two of them, finding no objection.

Will blinked, momentarily taken back in his enthusiasm, for one could get the impression that he had actually been looking forward to ask either of the young ladies for a dance himself. "You can't!" He exclaimed.

"And why is that so?" J answered dryly.

Will shook his head. "That would be just too sad! "

It needs no mention that neither woman found that to be a satisfying argument, as neither woman's connection to emotions in general was fine enough to detect them as suitable anchors in discussion.

"Too bad…" J grinned, and raised her glass of champagne to him while grinning.

Seconds later, that grin was stolen from her face harshly.

"You know what would be too bad?" Will's voice had changed volumes and intention faster than some of the women around them had changed from their high heels into more dance fitting flat shoes. Yet another blinking sign of alarm was the fact that Sabrina had detached herself from the wall she had been leaning against, and was gazing Will straight in the face with an expression that could only be called "cold, emotionless stare of death".

And yet, unfortunately, he did not fall over trembling with a sudden heart attack.

Will leaned forward and tried to whisper into J's ear, but was interrupted by Sabrina leaning in as well, effectively killing at least the atmosphere, if she wasn't able to kill the intruder himself. Still, the elite four sighed and continued. "It would be too bad if someone found out who you really are and, ah, accidently reveals it to the league champion, no, wouldn't that be just too sad?"

To J's defense, no one could later tell if she had truly poured her glass into his face or if she had been tripped by Sabrina into doing it.

"Asshole!" J cursed, though once she had managed to twist her mouth into the right position to formulate mature words, Will had long since been gone, standing dangerously close to Lance and smirking in their direction from time to time.

"How did he know?" she asked, in truth, no one in particular, but she still got her answer from the nearest possible answering machine.

"He's psychic. He likely knew from the beginning by reading your mind."

J wanted to curse again, but found that she just didn't have the right ensemble of swearwords on hand to truly characterize him. Psychics! Damned psychics and their out-of-the-world mind tricks! Not only did they have to ruin her business, now they had to ruin an evening that had been running perfectly well for her so far! "Why does he want us to dance? Is he some kind of pervert?"

Sabrina shook her head. "I think he has a wicked sense of humor."

"Bloody right he has…" J grumbled, before straightening herself. "So what do we do now?"

Killing him was still an open option, wasn't it? It didn't have to be of supernatural origins, as was at least sure that every living thing that possessed a brain would be stone-dead If said brain was whisked into rosy mush.

Sabrina seemed to shrug, but with her physically resembling a statue, it was hard to tell. "Dance, I would guess."

J sighed. She wasn't spared any kind of embarrassment, now was she?

"Can you dance, at all?"

"No."

No, she really wasn't spared that kind of embarrassment.

She supposed that, in the end, not stepping on each other's feet was an accomplishment, as was not blushing furiously when having to touch the other's body. There must have been a strange attraction to seeing two very stiff and uncomfortable women whose heights did not even match dancing together, otherwise, she really couldn't explain why half of the hall applauded them. There might have been the general attraction that were two women doing anything even remotely resembling erotic action, but she was fairly sure this wasn't the case here, because they weren't . As was the fake, haughty approval of same-sex relationships that all too often only went one direction anyway.

Either way, by the end of the song, she was very glad that it was over, and the rest of the hall should have been thankful that it had gone over them without so much as a single drop of blood being shed and no toes that she knew of being broken. J was very sure that while she was still composing the best way to slaughter the damned chauvy of elite psychic with the knife hidden under the dinner table, her dancing partner was just as much contemplating if she should erase the memories of everyone that had seen even the slightest glance of them dancing together. Before or after making their brains implode, that was.

In one way or another, that was the end of the night for both of them, anyway, as Sabrina didn't want to take any more risks and explained, in the most polite voice she managed that also wasn't an implication of wanting to tear his throat out to Lance, that both of them were indisposed and would leave for home right away. Which was more of a formality than anything, since officially, the ball was over as soon as the last note of the first song had faded away. Everything else was just an uncoordinated mess of getting drunk and trying to score for the night, attended by the more risky folks. Or, alternatively, the ones drunk enough to forego the risks anyway.

J still regretted not shoving a fork down the other psychic's ass as he grinned in their direction during their farewell. It wouldn't matter, though, J resumed, because she had just decided who would be the first victim after her ship had gotten the new supernatural repellent upgrade. Plus, it seemed time for her to finally study the nature of psychic Pokemon in general. Know your enemy, and all that stuff.

All of that only left one thing to do, that was, getting home. And knowing her new acquaintance, that meant getting ready for yet another stomach stirring teleport, right after filling it up right to bursting. Surprisingly, though, she led her outside at first, exposing them once again to the chilly cold of the Indigo mountains.

J had the slightest feeling of what was to come, so she waved it aside before Sabrina had even time to open her mouth. "Don't fret that, it was an okay night, even with that freak ruining it. No need to thank me." After all, if everything, she had to thank the psychic for letting her free despite the less obvious effects it might have had, or still have, on her own career. Not that J really cared. Live and let live, wasn't it? In the end, she wasn't the lonesome freak unable to get a date, was she?

A blink. "Yet I still want to thank you nevertheless. I would have been at a disadvantage if I hadn't been able to bring someone along."

J tried not to make it obvious that she rolled her eyes. She still could have picked up some hobo from the streets, if she had been that desperate and willing to show up at all, couldn't she?

"Okay. Got it. Ah, just…next time, give me a bit more time to prepare, though, huh?" J froze. Wait, had she actually said that? Out loud? Right here? _Next time_? Who had said anything about a second time?

She herself, apparently.

Apparently, Sabrina had noticed her slip up as well, and managed what J would soon come to dub her Mona-Lisa smile, for there was no other explanation for a smile to look so subtle you were imagining it half the time. "I see. I will make sure of that." And with that, she leaned forward, giving a throughout baffled J a short kiss on the cheek. Immediately afterwards, the villain found herself teleported back onto her ship, hotness and moisture still lingering on her cheek, still in her dinner clothes, which prompted flabbergasted looks and giggles caught stiff in the throats of her henchman.

"One word, and half of you will find themselves fired, and the other half will find themselves fired from the back hatch." That did have its usual effect, for the men apologized hurriedly and scurried of to their respective posts.

J allowed herself to slip into her seat and grin. It was, for once, nice to have things back to normality.


End file.
